Analyzing the longitudinal impact of proximity, location, and personality on smartphone usage

Abstract

Background: Over the past few years, mobile devices, particularly smartphones have seen dramatic increases in data consumption. The significant increases in data usage have placed tremendous strain on the wireless infrastructure, necessitating research across a variety of optimization, efficiency, and capacity improvements. Complementary to those research efforts is the acquisition of a better understanding of what aspects drive user smartphone usage. Methods: In this paper, we leverage the unique characteristics of the NetSense study, a longitudinal study covering three years of a large cohort of smartphone users, to demonstrate how proximity, location, and individual differences (e.g., personality) can play an important role in understanding smartphone usage over time. We analyze the longitudinal impact of proximity density, personality, and location on smartphone traffic consumption. Results and Discussion: We show that friendship proximity (i.e., SMS contacts and Facebook friendship) has a significant impact on traffic consumption and personality tends to impact application preference / consumption; However, the true behavior might not be presented due to restrictions of network connectivity. Applications can have significantly different contextual usages based on the location. Conclusions: We believe our study raises the importance of considering proximity, personality, and location as context relevant for the purposes of assessing user data consumption.

A Survey on Machine Learning‐Based Mobile Big Data Analysis: Challenges and Applications

“…Figure 5(a) is an example of how browsed applications and current location related to each other from the view of temporal and spatial regularity. It has been found that the mobility behaviors have strong influences on online browsing behavior [149,153,154]. Similar trends can also be observed for crowds at crowd gathering places, as is shown in Figure 5(b); i.e., certain apps are favored at places that group people together and provide some specific functions.…”

“…It is discovered that the more the number of distinct cells a user visit, the more diverse applications user has visited. Zheng et al [153] analyze the longitudinal impact of proximity density, personality, and location on smartphone traffic consumption. In particular, location has been proven to have strong influences on what kinds of apps users prefer to use [149,153].…”

“…Zheng et al [153] analyze the longitudinal impact of proximity density, personality, and location on smartphone traffic consumption. In particular, location has been proven to have strong influences on what kinds of apps users prefer to use [149,153]. The aforementioned observations point out that there is a close relationship between online browsing behavior and offline mobility behavior.…”